Free Republic

An up-to-date estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom has not been produced for 15 years, according to a report. The National Audit Office (NAO) said the last estimate in 2005 suggested there were around 430,000 people in the country with no right to remain. But independent research since has put the figure at more than one million, Whitehall’s spending watchdog said. […] In the year to October 2019, detected attempts by people to come into the UK by clandestine means increased to 46,900. However, the NAO said it was not clear if this was because...

Former Conservative prime minister David Cameron lashed out at Boris Johnson today, branding his decision to axe the UK’s foreign aid department a “mistake”. In what is believed to be his first policy intervention since quitting in 2016. ex-premier Mr. Cameron joined his Labour predecessors to criticize Mr. Johnson’s decision to scrap the Department for International Development. The Prime Minister told MPs in the Commons today it will be merged into the Foreign Office to create the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, in a bid to “maximize British influence” overseas. He said the move would “unite our aid with our...

The headstones of two music hall singers at a cemetery in the UK have been covered up with wooden pallets and trash bags to hide “offensive” language. “The gravestones of G H Elliott and Alice Banford, who both wore blackface, are now covered at St Margaret’s Church in Rottingdean,” reports BBC News. The Archdeacon for Brighton said efforts were underway to contact family members in order to have the inscriptions changed. “I find the inscription on these two headstones deeply offensive and am sure that the vast majority of people would agree and would want it changed,” said Archdeacon Martin Lloyd...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells the story of a major drama that unfolded behind the scenes at the UN Security Council shortly before former US President Barack Obama left office. New details about some drama involving Israel, Russia, and the US that played out behind the scenes at the United Nations Security Council some four years ago are coming to light. more.... It appears that Russia demonstrated a rare willingness to use its UNSC veto on Israel's behalf to block a resolution led by then-US President Barack Obama, which would have compelled Israel to set up a Palestinian state based...

A cheap steroid called dexamethasone has been found to reduce the risk of death by up to one-third among coronavirus patients with severe respiratory complications, University of Oxford researchers have said.

HONG KONG — China's Communist Party has haunted Leung's family for generations. Her father, Guo Yao, fled forced labor and the violent purges of the Cultural Revolution for a better life in Hong Kong, where he arrived with his wife in 1973 to find relative freedom and prosperity. Years later, as his family watched the ceremony marking Hong Kong's 1997 handover from Britain to China, his then-teenage daughter had a premonition. “I thought to myself, maybe one day we will have to run away from the Chinese Communist Party again,” said Leung, now 36. “I just didn’t imagine it would...

Urgent legislation has been passed. All protests of morethan 6 people are now illegal. Not a single MP opposed it.#AllProtestsMatter https://twitter.com/MrMasonMills/status/1272619292715028482  

Penny Lane, the Liverpool street made famous by the Beatles, could soon be facing a name change, according to the city’s Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram. Last week, four road signs bearing the name “Penny Lane” were vandalized, with the word “racist” painted over one of them, because some believe the street was named after James Penny, a slave trader from the late 1700s, Rolling Stone reported. “If it is as a direct consequence of that road being called Penny Lane because of James Penny, then that needs to be investigated,” Rotheram told Sky News on Monday. “Something needs to happen...

Boris Johnson will warn the EU today Britain will choose a no-deal Brexit if a trade agreement is not struck by the end of next month. The threat comes despite the head of the World Trade Organization suggesting that doing so could slow the UK’s economic recovery from coronavirus, and that a deal similar to current arrangements would be better for jobs. WTO director-general Roberto Azevêdo highlighted agriculture and the car industry as two of the biggest victims if a deal could not not be struck, due to the heavy tariffs they would be subject to under trade rules. The...

Penny Lane, the road in Liverpool that gained worldwide recognition after The Beatles wrote a song about it, is now “in danger of being renamed” if it can be proven that its title is linked to a slave trader, a local politician says. Steve Rotherham, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, issued the warning to Sky News on Monday as a debate has emerged over the origins of the name Penny Lane. One of the road’s signs was defaced on Friday with the word “RACIST” spray-painted next to it in an apparent reference to James Penny, a Liverpool-based slave...

China is bracing for a stronger pushback from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, as its members unite to tackle an increasingly assertive Beijing together, observers said. Analysts said that with China and the alliance’s members clashing on a range of fronts – from the handling of the coronavirus pandemic to Hong Kong and 5G technology – there was a growing understanding within the Five Eyes that taking on China alone or one at a time would not work. But the concerted efforts of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States has not gone unnoticed, with state media highlighting...

Heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury has told Boris Johnson to “grow a pair” after seeing Sir Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square repeatedly vandalised at Black Lives Matter protests. The wartime prime minister’s statue has been defaced with graffiti branding him a racist and slogans such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “ACAB” (“All Coppers Are Bastards”) at Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the United Kingdom, which have quickly moved on from protesting the death of George Floyd in the United States to demands for the removal historic monuments and memorials whose activities and views are considered problematic by the standards...

Black Lives Matter supporters have seriously assaulted a number of people suspected of being “far-right” in London. The day’s protests saw Black Lives Matter supporters take to the capital’s streets in reduced numbers after some organisers attempted to call off planned demonstrations, along with counter-protesters including veterans, football fans, and some far-right elements, intending to prevent the vandalisation of historic statues and war memorials which has characterised previous BLM demonstrations. Police, who at previous protests were seen kneeling to BLM supporters, fleeing from violent mobs, and failing to protect monuments such as Churchill’s statue and the Cenotaph war memorial, adopted...

London’s assistant commissioner for police Neil Basu said he would “probably” have joined Black Lives Matter protests if he was not a police officer, despite activists having already injured at least 60 of his officers. Assistant Commissioner Basu is the highest-ranking officer in the UK from an ethnic-minority background, one of the top six officers in the Metropolitan Police Service, and one of 50 senior officers across the country.

Hundreds of hooligans have rushed up to the police blockade outside the Cenotaph during a fierce counter-protest to today's Black Lives Matter rally in London. Riot squads armed with batons and shields are holding a line in the middle of Westminster to prevent the two groups from clashing. Crowds of pro-statue campaigners surrounded the monument of Winston Churchill, which has been boarded up by Sadiq Khan for fear of it becoming a 'flashpoint' of far-right violence.

Police in Sydney, Australia were deployed to form a ring of protection around a statue of Captain Cook, putting to shame Boris Johnson’s UK government, which capitulated by hiding Winston Churchill inside a box. “Heavy police presence protecting the Captain Cook statue in Sydney’s Hyde Park after a last minute change of location to tonight’s Black Lives Matter protest,” tweeted journalist Emily Ritchie. “About 400 peaceful protestors marched, surrounded by a significant number of police.” The video clip shows officers forming a protection line around the statue, which is a life-size representation of British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in...

Conservative British politician and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has left his talk show at LBC radio after he made comments comparing the Black Lives Matter supporters to the Taliban. Farage faced a storm of backlash after tweeting about protesters demonstrating against police brutality and racial discrimination. Protests in the United States over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died while police custody, have spread around the world, including England. “A new form of the Taliban was born in the UK today,” Farage tweeted Sunday. “Unless we get moral leadership quickly our cities won't be worth living...

The feminist left's embrace of transgenderism probably means a lot of younger people have never encountered a feminist with Rowling's position on trans issues. To some of them, such a feminist is unthinkable. J.K. Rowling’s decision to double-down on her resistance to transgender dogma is not surprising but it is powerful, and for one particular reason: her feminist framing.After irking leftists for more than a year with her increasingly public opposition to the movement, the “Harry Potter” author self-published a long, thoughtful essay explaining her reasoning on Wednesday. You can read the full post here. It is compassionate and reasonable...

Andie Hosch, 23, and his partner decided to try for a baby one year ago - while he was transitioning with the use of hormones and undergoing surgery. "But I started seeing some other transgender people getting pregnant that and I started exploring the idea and unlearning the internalized transphobia that told me I couldn't be a man who could birth a child. "A part of me was me feeling as though I shouldn't want to carry a child because of internalized beliefs about what it means 'to be a man' and that somehow carrying a child invalidated my gender."...

oncologist says medics can too easily put Covid on death certificates ... The Covid-19 death toll may be less than half of what has been recorded because many victims of the pandemic would have died soon anyway, one of Britain's leading medics has said. Professor Karol Sikora, a senior oncologist who has built a huge Twitter following for his positive takes on the virus crisis, said doctors were sometimes too eager to put Covid-19 on death certificates. ... This was in contrast to Germany, where a death can only be recorded as being caused by Covid-19 when the clinical team...